by Kerby Anderson

When George Wallace ran his presidential campaign in 1968, he had the slogan that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference” between his two opponents (Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey). Actually there was more the ten cents worth of difference back then, and there is a billion dollars worth of difference now.

Most of the controversy surrounding the Republican Party platform last week focused on a few issues. It rejected many of the demands of LGBT activists and criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling that legalized same-sex marriage. It stated that marriage should be defined as between a man and a woman. It also called for a wall rather than a fence on the Mexican border. Although the New York Times claimed that the platform went far to the right, it wasn’t really that different in many ways from the 2012 Republican Platform.

That is not the case for the Democratic Platform. William Galston served in the Clinton administration and explained in a recent op-ed how the Democratic Platform has veered sharply to the left. This is no doubt due to the many Bernie Sanders delegates who have been working hard to move the party even further to the left. Galston says: “The party that Hillary Clinton will lead into battle this fall is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party.”

It includes a $15 per hour minimum wage and makes the case for government to expand its reach far beyond the platform proposals of four years ago. The 2012 platform declared that the death penalty must not be “arbitrary.” This year, the platform demands the abolition of the death penalty. Four years ago, the platform called for the reasonable regulation of guns. This time there is no reference at all to the Second Amendment.

I encourage you to look at the two party platforms. We will post them on the Point of View website. No one can say that there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between these two parties. The platforms are strikingly different from each other on virtually every issue.